CMake is a cross-platform build-generator tool. CMake
does not build the project, it generates the files needed by your build tool
(GNU make, Visual Studio, etc.) for building LLVM.

If you are a new contributor, please start with the Getting Started with the LLVM System
page. This page is geared for existing contributors moving from the
legacy configure/make system.

If you are really anxious about getting a functional LLVM build, go to the
Quick start section. If you are a CMake novice, start with Basic CMake usage
and then go back to the Quick start section once you know what you are doing. The
Options and variables section is a reference for customizing your build. If
you already have experience with CMake, this is the recommended starting point.

This page is geared towards users of the LLVM CMake build. If you’re looking for
information about modifying the LLVM CMake build system you may want to see the
CMake Primer page. It has a basic overview of the CMake language.

Open a shell. Your development tools must be reachable from this shell
through the PATH environment variable.

Create a build directory. Building LLVM in the source
directory is not supported. cd to this directory:

$ mkdir mybuilddir
$cd mybuilddir

Execute this command in the shell replacing path/to/llvm/source/root with
the path to the root of your LLVM source tree:

$ cmake path/to/llvm/source/root

CMake will detect your development environment, perform a series of tests, and
generate the files required for building LLVM. CMake will use default values
for all build parameters. See the Options and variables section for
a list of build parameters that you can modify.

This can fail if CMake can’t detect your toolset, or if it thinks that the
environment is not sane enough. In this case, make sure that the toolset that
you intend to use is the only one reachable from the shell, and that the shell
itself is the correct one for your development environment. CMake will refuse
to build MinGW makefiles if you have a POSIX shell reachable through the PATH
environment variable, for instance. You can force CMake to use a given build
tool; for instructions, see the Usage section, below.

After CMake has finished running, proceed to use IDE project files, or start
the build from the build directory:

This section explains basic aspects of CMake
which you may need in your day-to-day usage.

CMake comes with extensive documentation, in the form of html files, and as
online help accessible via the cmake executable itself. Execute cmake--help for further help options.

CMake allows you to specify a build tool (e.g., GNU make, Visual Studio,
or Xcode). If not specified on the command line, CMake tries to guess which
build tool to use, based on your environment. Once it has identified your
build tool, CMake uses the corresponding Generator to create files for your
build tool (e.g., Makefiles or Visual Studio or Xcode project files). You can
explicitly specify the generator with the command line option -G"Nameofthegenerator". To see a list of the available generators on your system, execute

$ cmake --help

This will list the generator names at the end of the help text.

Generators’ names are case-sensitive, and may contain spaces. For this reason,
you should enter them exactly as they are listed in the cmake--help
output, in quotes. For example, to generate project files specifically for
Visual Studio 12, you can execute:

$ cmake -G "Visual Studio 12" path/to/llvm/source/root

For a given development platform there can be more than one adequate
generator. If you use Visual Studio, “NMake Makefiles” is a generator you can use
for building with NMake. By default, CMake chooses the most specific generator
supported by your development environment. If you want an alternative generator,
you must tell this to CMake with the -G option.

Here are some of the CMake variables that are used often, along with a
brief explanation and LLVM-specific notes. For full documentation, consult the
CMake manual, or execute cmake--help-variableVARIABLE_NAME.

CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE:STRING

Sets the build type for make-based generators. Possible values are
Release, Debug, RelWithDebInfo and MinSizeRel. If you are using an IDE such as
Visual Studio, you should use the IDE settings to set the build type.
Be aware that Release and RelWithDebInfo use different optimization levels on
most platforms.

CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH

Path where LLVM will be installed if “make install” is invoked or the
“install” target is built.

LLVM_LIBDIR_SUFFIX:STRING

Extra suffix to append to the directory where libraries are to be
installed. On a 64-bit architecture, one could use -DLLVM_LIBDIR_SUFFIX=64
to install libraries to /usr/lib64.

Semicolon-separated list of targets to build, or all for building all
targets. Case-sensitive. Defaults to all. Example:
-DLLVM_TARGETS_TO_BUILD="X86;PowerPC".

LLVM_BUILD_TOOLS:BOOL

Build LLVM tools. Defaults to ON. Targets for building each tool are generated
in any case. You can build a tool separately by invoking its target. For
example, you can build llvm-as with a Makefile-based system by executing make
llvm-as at the root of your build directory.

LLVM_INCLUDE_TOOLS:BOOL

Generate build targets for the LLVM tools. Defaults to ON. You can use this
option to disable the generation of build targets for the LLVM tools.

LLVM_INSTALL_BINUTILS_SYMLINKS:BOOL

Install symlinks from the binutils tool names to the corresponding LLVM tools.
For example, ar will be symlinked to llvm-ar.

LLVM_BUILD_EXAMPLES:BOOL

Build LLVM examples. Defaults to OFF. Targets for building each example are
generated in any case. See documentation for LLVM_BUILD_TOOLS above for more
details.

LLVM_INCLUDE_EXAMPLES:BOOL

Generate build targets for the LLVM examples. Defaults to ON. You can use this
option to disable the generation of build targets for the LLVM examples.

LLVM_BUILD_TESTS:BOOL

Build LLVM unit tests. Defaults to OFF. Targets for building each unit test
are generated in any case. You can build a specific unit test using the
targets defined under unittests, such as ADTTests, IRTests, SupportTests,
etc. (Search for add_llvm_unittest in the subdirectories of unittests
for a complete list of unit tests.) It is possible to build all unit tests
with the target UnitTests.

LLVM_INCLUDE_TESTS:BOOL

Generate build targets for the LLVM unit tests. Defaults to ON. You can use
this option to disable the generation of build targets for the LLVM unit
tests.

LLVM_APPEND_VC_REV:BOOL

Embed version control revision info (svn revision number or Git revision id).
The version info is provided by the LLVM_REVISION macro in
llvm/include/llvm/Support/VCSRevision.h. Developers using git who don’t
need revision info can disable this option to avoid re-linking most binaries
after a branch switch. Defaults to ON.

LLVM_ENABLE_THREADS:BOOL

Build with threads support, if available. Defaults to ON.

LLVM_ENABLE_CXX1Y:BOOL

Build in C++1y mode, if available. Defaults to OFF.

LLVM_ENABLE_ASSERTIONS:BOOL

Enables code assertions. Defaults to ON if and only if CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE
is Debug.

LLVM_ENABLE_EH:BOOL

Build LLVM with exception-handling support. This is necessary if you wish to
link against LLVM libraries and make use of C++ exceptions in your own code
that need to propagate through LLVM code. Defaults to OFF.

LLVM_ENABLE_EXPENSIVE_CHECKS:BOOL

Enable additional time/memory expensive checking. Defaults to OFF.

LLVM_ENABLE_PIC:BOOL

Add the -fPIC flag to the compiler command-line, if the compiler supports
this flag. Some systems, like Windows, do not need this flag. Defaults to ON.

Stop and fail the build, if a compiler warning is triggered. Defaults to OFF.

LLVM_ABI_BREAKING_CHECKS:STRING

Used to decide if LLVM should be built with ABI breaking checks or
not. Allowed values are WITH_ASSERTS (default), FORCE_ON and
FORCE_OFF. WITH_ASSERTS turns on ABI breaking checks in an
assertion enabled build. FORCE_ON (FORCE_OFF) turns them on
(off) irrespective of whether normal (NDEBUG-based) assertions are
enabled or not. A version of LLVM built with ABI breaking checks
is not ABI compatible with a version built without it.

LLVM_BUILD_32_BITS:BOOL

Build 32-bit executables and libraries on 64-bit systems. This option is
available only on some 64-bit Unix systems. Defaults to OFF.

LLVM_TARGET_ARCH:STRING

LLVM target to use for native code generation. This is required for JIT
generation. It defaults to “host”, meaning that it shall pick the architecture
of the machine where LLVM is being built. If you are cross-compiling, set it
to the target architecture name.

LLVM_TABLEGEN:STRING

Full path to a native TableGen executable (usually named llvm-tblgen). This is
intended for cross-compiling: if the user sets this variable, no native
TableGen will be created.

LLVM_LIT_ARGS:STRING

Arguments given to lit. makecheck and makeclang-test are affected.
By default, '-sv--no-progress-bar' on Visual C++ and Xcode, '-sv' on
others.

LLVM_LIT_TOOLS_DIR:PATH

The path to GnuWin32 tools for tests. Valid on Windows host. Defaults to
the empty string, in which case lit will look for tools needed for tests
(e.g. grep, sort, etc.) in your %PATH%. If GnuWin32 is not in your
%PATH%, then you can set this variable to the GnuWin32 directory so that
lit can find tools needed for tests in that directory.

LLVM_ENABLE_FFI:BOOL

Indicates whether the LLVM Interpreter will be linked with the Foreign Function
Interface library (libffi) in order to enable calling external functions.
If the library or its headers are installed in a custom
location, you can also set the variables FFI_INCLUDE_DIR and
FFI_LIBRARY_DIR to the directories where ffi.h and libffi.so can be found,
respectively. Defaults to OFF.

LLVM_EXTERNAL_{CLANG,LLD,POLLY}_SOURCE_DIR:PATH

These variables specify the path to the source directory for the external
LLVM projects Clang, lld, and Polly, respectively, relative to the top-level
source directory. If the in-tree subdirectory for an external project
exists (e.g., llvm/tools/clang for Clang), then the corresponding variable
will not be used. If the variable for an external project does not point
to a valid path, then that project will not be built.

LLVM_ENABLE_PROJECTS:STRING

Semicolon-separated list of projects to build, or all for building all
(clang, libcxx, libcxxabi, lldb, compiler-rt, lld, polly) projects.
This flag assumes that projects are checked out side-by-side and not nested,
i.e. clang needs to be in parallel of llvm instead of nested in llvm/tools.
This feature allows to have one build for only LLVM and another for clang+llvm
using the same source checkout.

LLVM_EXTERNAL_PROJECTS:STRING

Semicolon-separated list of additional external projects to build as part of
llvm. For each project LLVM_EXTERNAL_<NAME>_SOURCE_DIR have to be specified
with the path for the source code of the project. Example:
-DLLVM_EXTERNAL_PROJECTS="Foo;Bar"-DLLVM_EXTERNAL_FOO_SOURCE_DIR=/src/foo-DLLVM_EXTERNAL_BAR_SOURCE_DIR=/src/bar.

LLVM_USE_OPROFILE:BOOL

Enable building OProfile JIT support. Defaults to OFF.

LLVM_PROFDATA_FILE:PATH

Path to a profdata file to pass into clang’s -fprofile-instr-use flag. This
can only be specified if you’re building with clang.

LLVM_USE_INTEL_JITEVENTS:BOOL

Enable building support for Intel JIT Events API. Defaults to OFF.

LLVM_ENABLE_LIBPFM:BOOL

Enable building with libpfm to support hardware counter measurements in LLVM
tools.
Defaults to ON.

Add -fuse-ld={name} to the link invocation. The possible value depend on
your compiler, for clang the value can be an absolute path to your custom
linker, otherwise clang will prefix the name with ld. and apply its usual
search. For example to link LLVM with the Gold linker, cmake can be invoked
with -DLLVM_USE_LINKER=gold.

LLVM_ENABLE_LLD:BOOL

This option is equivalent to -DLLVM_USE_LINKER=lld, except during a 2-stage
build where a dependency is added from the first stage to the second ensuring
that lld is built before stage2 begins.

LLVM_PARALLEL_COMPILE_JOBS:STRING

Define the maximum number of concurrent compilation jobs.

LLVM_PARALLEL_LINK_JOBS:STRING

Define the maximum number of concurrent link jobs.

LLVM_BUILD_DOCS:BOOL

Adds all enabled documentation targets (i.e. Doxgyen and Sphinx targets) as
dependencies of the default build targets. This results in all of the (enabled)
documentation targets being as part of a normal build. If the install
target is run then this also enables all built documentation targets to be
installed. Defaults to OFF. To enable a particular documentation target, see
see LLVM_ENABLE_SPHINX and LLVM_ENABLE_DOXYGEN.

LLVM_ENABLE_DOXYGEN:BOOL

Enables the generation of browsable HTML documentation using doxygen.
Defaults to OFF.

LLVM_ENABLE_DOXYGEN_QT_HELP:BOOL

Enables the generation of a Qt Compressed Help file. Defaults to OFF.
This affects the make target doxygen-llvm. When enabled, apart from
the normal HTML output generated by doxygen, this will produce a QCH file
named org.llvm.qch. You can then load this file into Qt Creator.
This option is only useful in combination with -DLLVM_ENABLE_DOXYGEN=ON;
otherwise this has no effect.

LLVM_DOXYGEN_QCH_FILENAME:STRING

The filename of the Qt Compressed Help file that will be generated when
-DLLVM_ENABLE_DOXYGEN=ON and
-DLLVM_ENABLE_DOXYGEN_QT_HELP=ON are given. Defaults to
org.llvm.qch.
This option is only useful in combination with
-DLLVM_ENABLE_DOXYGEN_QT_HELP=ON;
otherwise it has no effect.

LLVM_DOXYGEN_QHP_NAMESPACE:STRING

Namespace under which the intermediate Qt Help Project file lives. See Qt
Help Project
for more information. Defaults to “org.llvm”. This option is only useful in
combination with -DLLVM_ENABLE_DOXYGEN_QT_HELP=ON; otherwise
it has no effect.

LLVM_DOXYGEN_QHP_CUST_FILTER_NAME:STRING

See Qt Help Project for
more information. Defaults to the CMake variable ${PACKAGE_STRING} which
is a combination of the package name and version string. This filter can then
be used in Qt Creator to select only documentation from LLVM when browsing
through all the help files that you might have loaded. This option is only
useful in combination with -DLLVM_ENABLE_DOXYGEN_QT_HELP=ON;
otherwise it has no effect.

LLVM_DOXYGEN_QHELPGENERATOR_PATH:STRING

The path to the qhelpgenerator executable. Defaults to whatever CMake’s
find_program() can find. This option is only useful in combination with
-DLLVM_ENABLE_DOXYGEN_QT_HELP=ON; otherwise it has no
effect.

LLVM_DOXYGEN_SVG:BOOL

Uses .svg files instead of .png files for graphs in the Doxygen output.
Defaults to OFF.

LLVM_INSTALL_DOXYGEN_HTML_DIR:STRING

The path to install Doxygen-generated HTML documentation to. This path can
either be absolute or relative to the CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX. Defaults to
share/doc/llvm/doxygen-html.

LLVM_ENABLE_SPHINX:BOOL

If specified, CMake will search for the sphinx-build executable and will make
the SPHINX_OUTPUT_HTML and SPHINX_OUTPUT_MAN CMake options available.
Defaults to OFF.

If enabled (and LLVM_ENABLE_SPHINX is enabled) then the targets for
building the documentation as html are added (but not built by default unless
LLVM_BUILD_DOCS is enabled). There is a target for each project in the
source tree that uses sphinx (e.g. docs-llvm-html, docs-clang-html
and docs-lld-html). Defaults to ON.

SPHINX_OUTPUT_MAN:BOOL

If enabled (and LLVM_ENABLE_SPHINX is enabled) the targets for building
the man pages are added (but not built by default unless LLVM_BUILD_DOCS
is enabled). Currently the only target added is docs-llvm-man. Defaults
to ON.

SPHINX_WARNINGS_AS_ERRORS:BOOL

If enabled then sphinx documentation warnings will be treated as
errors. Defaults to ON.

LLVM_INSTALL_SPHINX_HTML_DIR:STRING

The path to install Sphinx-generated HTML documentation to. This path can
either be absolute or relative to the CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX. Defaults to
share/doc/llvm/html.

LLVM_INSTALL_OCAMLDOC_HTML_DIR:STRING

The path to install OCamldoc-generated HTML documentation to. This path can
either be absolute or relative to the CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX. Defaults to
share/doc/llvm/ocaml-html.

LLVM_CREATE_XCODE_TOOLCHAIN:BOOL

OS X Only: If enabled CMake will generate a target named
‘install-xcode-toolchain’. This target will create a directory at
$CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX/Toolchains containing an xctoolchain directory which can
be used to override the default system tools.

LLVM_BUILD_LLVM_DYLIB:BOOL

If enabled, the target for building the libLLVM shared library is added.
This library contains all of LLVM’s components in a single shared library.
Defaults to OFF. This cannot be used in conjunction with BUILD_SHARED_LIBS.
Tools will only be linked to the libLLVM shared library if LLVM_LINK_LLVM_DYLIB
is also ON.
The components in the library can be customised by setting LLVM_DYLIB_COMPONENTS
to a list of the desired components.

LLVM_LINK_LLVM_DYLIB:BOOL

If enabled, tools will be linked with the libLLVM shared library. Defaults
to OFF. Setting LLVM_LINK_LLVM_DYLIB to ON also sets LLVM_BUILD_LLVM_DYLIB
to ON.

BUILD_SHARED_LIBS:BOOL

Flag indicating if each LLVM component (e.g. Support) is built as a shared
library (ON) or as a static library (OFF). Its default value is OFF. On
Windows, shared libraries may be used when building with MinGW, including
mingw-w64, but not when building with the Microsoft toolchain.

Note

BUILD_SHARED_LIBS is only recommended for use by LLVM developers.
If you want to build LLVM as a shared library, you should use the
LLVM_BUILD_LLVM_DYLIB option.

LLVM_OPTIMIZED_TABLEGEN:BOOL

If enabled and building a debug or asserts build the CMake build system will
generate a Release build tree to build a fully optimized tablegen for use
during the build. Enabling this option can significantly speed up build times
especially when building LLVM in Debug configurations.

LLVM_REVERSE_ITERATION:BOOL

If enabled, all supported unordered llvm containers would be iterated in
reverse order. This is useful for uncovering non-determinism caused by
iteration of unordered containers.

If enabled and the ccache program is available, then LLVM will be
built using ccache to speed up rebuilds of LLVM and its components.
Defaults to OFF. The size and location of the cache maintained
by ccache can be adjusted via the LLVM_CCACHE_MAXSIZE and LLVM_CCACHE_DIR
options, which are passed to the CCACHE_MAXSIZE and CCACHE_DIR environment
variables, respectively.

Recently LLVM and Clang have been adding some more complicated build system
features. Utilizing these new features often involves a complicated chain of
CMake variables passed on the command line. Clang provides a collection of CMake
cache scripts to make these features more approachable.

CMake cache files are utilized using CMake’s -C flag:

$ cmake -C <path to cache file> <path to sources>

CMake cache scripts are processed in an isolated scope, only cached variables
remain set when the main configuration runs. CMake cached variables do not reset
variables that are already set unless the FORCE option is specified.

A few notes about CMake Caches:

Order of command line arguments is important

-D arguments specified before -C are set before the cache is processed and
can be read inside the cache file

-D arguments specified after -C are set after the cache is processed and
are unset inside the cache file

All -D arguments will override cache file settings

CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE is evaluated after both the cache file and the command
line arguments

See this wiki page for
generic instructions on how to cross-compile with CMake. It goes into detailed
explanations and may seem daunting, but it is not. On the wiki page there are
several examples including toolchain files. Go directly to this section
for a quick solution.

From LLVM 3.5 onwards both the CMake and autoconf/Makefile build systems export
LLVM libraries as importable CMake targets. This means that clients of LLVM can
now reliably use CMake to develop their own LLVM-based projects against an
installed version of LLVM regardless of how it was built.

Here is a simple example of a CMakeLists.txt file that imports the LLVM libraries
and uses them to build a simple application simple-tool.

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION3.4.3)project(SimpleProject)find_package(LLVMREQUIREDCONFIG)message(STATUS"Found LLVM ${LLVM_PACKAGE_VERSION}")message(STATUS"Using LLVMConfig.cmake in: ${LLVM_DIR}")# Set your project compile flags.# E.g. if using the C++ header files# you will need to enable C++11 support# for your compiler.include_directories(${LLVM_INCLUDE_DIRS})add_definitions(${LLVM_DEFINITIONS})# Now build our toolsadd_executable(simple-tooltool.cpp)# Find the libraries that correspond to the LLVM components# that we wish to usellvm_map_components_to_libnames(llvm_libssupportcoreirreader)# Link against LLVM librariestarget_link_libraries(simple-tool${llvm_libs})

The find_package(...) directive when used in CONFIG mode (as in the above
example) will look for the LLVMConfig.cmake file in various locations (see
cmake manual for details). It creates a LLVM_DIR cache entry to save the
directory where LLVMConfig.cmake is found or allows the user to specify the
directory (e.g. by passing -DLLVM_DIR=/usr/lib/cmake/llvm to
the cmake command or by setting it directly in ccmake or cmake-gui).

This file is available in two different locations.

<INSTALL_PREFIX>/lib/cmake/llvm/LLVMConfig.cmake where
<INSTALL_PREFIX> is the install prefix of an installed version of LLVM.
On Linux typically this is /usr/lib/cmake/llvm/LLVMConfig.cmake.

<LLVM_BUILD_ROOT>/lib/cmake/llvm/LLVMConfig.cmake where
<LLVM_BUILD_ROOT> is the root of the LLVM build tree. Note: this is only
available when building LLVM with CMake.

If LLVM is installed in your operating system’s normal installation prefix (e.g.
on Linux this is usually /usr/) find_package(LLVM...) will
automatically find LLVM if it is installed correctly. If LLVM is not installed
or you wish to build directly against the LLVM build tree you can use
LLVM_DIR as previously mentioned.

The LLVMConfig.cmake file sets various useful variables. Notable variables
include

LLVM_CMAKE_DIR

The path to the LLVM CMake directory (i.e. the directory containing
LLVMConfig.cmake).

LLVM_DEFINITIONS

A list of preprocessor defines that should be used when building against LLVM.

LLVM_ENABLE_ASSERTIONS

This is set to ON if LLVM was built with assertions, otherwise OFF.

LLVM_ENABLE_EH

This is set to ON if LLVM was built with exception handling (EH) enabled,
otherwise OFF.

LLVM_ENABLE_RTTI

This is set to ON if LLVM was built with run time type information (RTTI),
otherwise OFF.

LLVM_INCLUDE_DIRS

A list of include paths to directories containing LLVM header files.

LLVM_PACKAGE_VERSION

The LLVM version. This string can be used with CMake conditionals, e.g., if(${LLVM_PACKAGE_VERSION}VERSION_LESS"3.5").

LLVM_TOOLS_BINARY_DIR

The path to the directory containing the LLVM tools (e.g. llvm-as).

Notice that in the above example we link simple-tool against several LLVM
libraries. The list of libraries is determined by using the
llvm_map_components_to_libnames() CMake function. For a list of available
components look at the output of running llvm-config--components.

Note that for LLVM < 3.5 llvm_map_components_to_libraries() was
used instead of llvm_map_components_to_libnames(). This is now deprecated
and will be removed in a future version of LLVM.

Specifies the maximum number of parallel compiler jobs to use per project
when building with msbuild or Visual Studio. Only supported for the Visual
Studio 2010 CMake generator. 0 means use all processors. Default is 0.